Obsession Review & The Rise of a New Horror Generation

At the time I’m writing this, Obsession, the debut horror movie by long-time YouTuber Curry Barker, has grossed $116 million domestically and recently outgrossed the new Star Wars movie at the weekend box office. Barker is a 26-year-old first-time feature filmmaker who reportedly made Obsession for $750,000 through independent financing. This kind of success on such a small budget rarely happens, especially with an independent production, and basically never with somebody as young as Curry Barker (except it just happened again, but we’ll get to that.) It’s nothing short of a fairy tale, a story amusingly reminiscent of the wish-fulfillment themes of the film itself. I recently saw the film in theaters and was struck by the sold-out audience (three weekends into the film’s release) being almost entirely young people. What is it about the film that is connecting so intensely with a young filmgoing audience? Are we finally seeing the rise of Gen Z in the adult filmmaking landscape, reminiscent of the American New Wave of the ’60s and ’70s, or the Indie film resurgence of the 90s? Most importantly of all, is Obsession good? Roll up your sleeves and watch out for bloodstains. Let’s get into it all.

Focus

Obsession joins the long lineage of horror born from the short story *The Monkey’s Paw*, written in 1902. It follows Bear, a downtrodden young adult who is head over heels for his coworker Nikki. After failing repeatedly to work up the courage to ask her out, Bear resigns to frustratedly use a One Wish Willow, a trinket he picked up in an occult store that claims to grant one wish to anyone who uses it. “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the f***ing world,” Bear says while breaking the willow tree branch, and almost immediately, all hell breaks loose.

It’s a premise that lives and dies on the ability to explore the ramifications of such a wish in a way that’s both substantive and scary. It’s a horror movie at the end of the day, and if all else fails, it succeeds in being scary; most moviegoers will leave feeling fulfilled. That’s where the genius of Obsession begins; it walks the line near flawlessly between thematic substance without sacrificing any of the fear. And trust me, there’s a lot of fear. At one point during my screening, I realized my heart rate was running surprisingly high. I checked my smartwatch’s heart rate monitor (after the film ended, don’t worry) and it clocked my BPA during the movie at a shocking 116 BPM. My resting rate usually sits around 60 BPM, so that gives you an idea of how intense a viewing this is.

Nikki’s magically unhinged love takes many turns, both expected and surprising, but always entertaining. An early nighttime scare effectively sets Nikki up as a constant threat for the viewer to be nervous about. The scene includes a wonderfully spooky shot of Bear’s bedroom, where, after the shot lingers for a few seconds, your stomach turns as you process that Nikki has been standing in the corner of the frame the whole time. From that point on in the film, she’s constantly lurking in the background of scenes or popping into frame to keep tabs on Bear’s actions. It deftly leads the viewer to be uneasy about every scene in the film; we’re trained to watch the fogged-out windows of a car or the out-of-focus background of a conversation because we know she’s likely to appear there eventually. It’s not a new tool to horror filmmaking by any means, but it’s employed so effectively that even though it became obvious Nikki was going to insert herself in nearly every scene, it never failed to scare me.

Focus

This funhouse-like approach to horror filmmaking feels completely in line with the themes of the movie. It exemplifies the obsessively codependent relationships that Barker is clearly commenting on. Entire scenes riff on the stereotypes of couples with no boundaries, making everyone else uncomfortable around them, but taken to horrifying extremes. To say the film is simply commenting on extreme codependency would be reductive, however, as there’s much more going on here. Some of the most disturbing moments of the film come from our brief glimpses into Nikki’s subconscious while she’s under the willow’s spell. It becomes apparent that she is still there somewhere, buried under the obsessive “love” that Bear cursed her with. She is experiencing everything, but as a passenger without control over the body she resides in. At points, it’s almost as if her mind is fighting with her body to regain control, only to fall back under the spell. This highlights an additional, and very ugly, layer to Bear’s character. He’s forcing both an emotional and physical relationship onto Nikki without her consent, and once he realizes that she’s suffering under the facade of love, he immediately retreats into self-centered insecurity. “What’s so bad about being with me?” he mutters after a particularly sad request for release made from Nikki’s subconscious. That line brilliantly recalls modern ideas of male entitlement, the fear that women must deal with when they reject unwanted advances, knowing that it will damage the man’s ego. Even with all the horrifying revelations about the situation that Bear has been privy to up to this point, he still can’t help but feel defensive over not being allowed complete control over Nikki’s personhood. It’s a deeply complex commentary that never feels preachy; it simply feels organic in the saddest way possible.

It’s admirable how mature the characterization of Bear is in this film. It would be easy for a first-time writer/director like Barker to fall into the trap of either treating Bear as a heartless monster who deserves no humanization or completely excusing his treatment of Nikki as an ugly form of “revenge” for friend-zoning him. Barker impressively avoids these pitfalls by never excusing Bear’s actions. Characters are frequently telling him he asked for this, emphasizing that Nikki’s current condition is his fault. But there is also room in the script to empathize with the character. Even including his many moral failings, Bear is still just a lonely young man who is desperate for emotional connection while being too cowardly to be vulnerable enough to reach for it. He didn’t think the wish would come true when he made it, and at the end of the plot, he gets a very small bit of redemption, albeit in a way that brilliantly highlights his character’s fatal flaw. A lesser screenwriter than Barker would likely focus too much on the character’s negatives, robbing us of the fully realized human the character becomes.

This brings me to the powerhouse performances at play here. Michael Johnston is quickly becoming underrated in the rhetoric around this film; his doe-eyed expressiveness and boy-next-door charms really help sell a character that would be nearly impossible to root for on paper, but somehow he makes us want him to make it out okay. But the clear story here, everyone’s already shouting it from the rooftops, is the star making turn from Inde Navarrette as Nikki. She brings a level of physical commitment to the role that calls to mind horror icons of the past, from Isabelle Adjani in Possession to Sissy Spacek in Carrie, to a more recent example of Toni Collette in Hereditary. It’s not hyperbole to say that this performance belongs right there alongside those juggernauts. Simply her presence on screen late into the movie is enough to generate chills. We’ll be seeing much more from her in the future, and I’m predicting that we’ll look back on Obsession as the film that launched her career into the stratosphere.

There are a few minor hiccups along the way. The film grasps at literary references a few times, and while they’re effective at being amusing, I’m not sure they land as anything meaningful below the surface level. The actual beats of the plot border on predictable and safe at times, which never really dampened the impact so much as they distract from important scenes. It’s hard to get entirely invested in some relationships when you’re constantly anticipating the horrible happening to them scene to scene. Curry Barker’s YouTube collaborator Cooper Tomlinson also feels a bit out of place here at Bear’s, apparently the only male friend. His frat bro inclinations fail to match the verisimilitude conjured by the performances of his castmates. In totality, however, Obsession ends up being more than simply an impressive debut feature; it’s an impressive feat of horror filmmaking by any measure and may have introduced us to multiple horror stalwarts of the future.

I wanted to take a moment to address the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in within the world of Hollywood. Not only is Obsession overperforming to a historic degree, but we also had another young first-time filmmaker burst onto the scene in a record-breaking way with Kane Parson’s Backrooms.

A24

The 20-year-old (gasp) director’s film released to an eyewatering $81 million weekend gross, easily breaking a record for production company A24. It’s interesting to consider if this is a turning point for the general landscape of Hollywood. Yet another YouTuber-turned-filmmaker dominating the box office over established Hollywood brands is simply something we’ve never seen before. Although they’ve undeniably made their mark this year already, the next generation of filmmakers seems to be a bit segmented into horror right now, and until Gen Z starts to create films that run the gamut of movie genres, I’m not prepared to proclaim this a new era of filmmaking just yet. Even so, I’m hoping this serves as a wake-up call to some of the phoned-in decision-making at recent major studios. It’s a long shot to hope that this directly spells the end of $100 million+ budget slopfests, but it’s quite the kick in the teeth for one of Disney’s biggest money makers to land third on a box office gross list behind two twentysomethings who have never made a film before.

Obsession Score: 4/5